Today is a supremely weird day. I had two things on my to-do list when I got in, added two and immediately knocked them off within a few hours, then stared at the original two things wondering how to get a foothold on them. I wouldn’t call this grunt work, but I might coin “grunt creativity,” which I now define as a situation driven by a lack of creativity in developing tasks that require creativity. I guess cynics might try “putting lipstick on a pig” (is that safe to use again now?).
I pulled out Shadow of the Colossus last night and beat I believe Colossus #7 (the electric water snake, for fans). It was stressful but in the sort of joyous sort of way that only relied on me actually beating the thing rather than spending an hour drowning while gripping onto its back underwater.
Kristin and I have blown the dust off Champions of Norrath, which is kind of a Playstation 2 Neverwinter Nights of sorts. We can play this co-op, which is rare and fun. The game isn’t too hard, and we mainly just like picking things up and selling them. We’re both accomplishment-oriented people in games.
I actually rolled an essentially pure magic-user for this go-round, which is a first for me. I did this for the better future of Sigma. It’s becoming well known that I have never valued attack magic in games, especially the strict sort of system used in MUDs and hardcore RPGs.
Although the spell system in Norrath is pretty bad, I am beginning to get my head around how the game is played from that perspective. I see that you assume more risk (more vulnerabilities) and must be compensated by truckloads of features, constructs, and general awesomeness. I see now that an overlay on the conventional weapons system is beyond weak.
The role is indirect and involves cleverly bending rules. This is now fun to me, which is a growth moment. It’s like playing a whole different game.
But I stress again the Norrath system is awful. It lacks creativity. For the most part, they used an overlay on an archery system, which is better but still not enough. And no auto-aiming is pretty miserable when you’re pretty clearly on some sort of octagonal grid or something in the back end. But this is graphical nonsense and fortunately avoids coming into play within Sigma.
I have taken the reins on the giving and accepting items implementation, which has really piqued my interest as of late. I have trouble in Python knowing how to key my dictionaries, so I typically at the last minute change concepts to a list and forget the dictionary altogether.
The cubes are still on fire, which was my term for the systems crash yesterday that my boss actually incorporated into a casual e-mail within the office. The Turkey file shows a size of 32,768 bytes, which is a pretty good warning you’re dealing with a placeholder.
I almost wish the thought of Linode hadn’t resurfaced yesterday, because now I’m jonesing to open up an account. I think it would be quite premature to do so (wasteful, not enough time right now to get it going right, Sigma should still probably be run locally for now, etc.).
The more I think about Sigma, the more I see opportunity for a totally stupid yet awesome feature: an inbuilt web server with system status and possibly even online mapping, etc. You could even do OLC (On-Line Creation, if that’s a Circle-specific term) with the right security and stuff. Security and cookie management and stuff could be handled by a lightweight web framework like web.py. Apache could proxy over to some high four digit port to the Python server to keep a solid server on the user-facing side.
Python could just pipe to Dot on the shell for diagramming, which would pretty much be turnkey mapping with the right setup. Of course, if Dot isn’t found that feature goes away passively. This is how Doxygen and I think some part of MediaWiki work for diagramming, in principle.
Dot and I are good friends, because it’s definitely a component of the reason I ended up in Turkey. People still don’t understand how I could generate diagrams on the fly, even after I explained that there is a programming language for it!
Of course, the Circle —> Sigma world file converter is the priority, and honestly it will be a cinch once I really get to it. The Circle area files are really primitive, and half of the features Circle has I don’t think we care about. So, lots of ignored fields.
I need to go ahead and get the Sony set up as a development machine, which will really ease my coding process. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the machine but I keep wanting to refresh the OS again. I don’t know why. This mentally prevents me from getting Python set up.
I’ve had about enough of Joyent’s harsh migration of TextDrive hosting customers. I have like three logins and passwords to different cartoon character-emblazened webpages.
What am I even subscribing to? Is it Connector, the snazzy e-collaboration suite, or perhaps StrongSpace, the online backup service? I don’t even know what BingoDisk is, but I may be buying that, too.
I just reupped for another year a few months ago (about the time we moved, I think). So I think this might be a good time to waste an amortized $70 or so and run two servers in parallel for a while.
If I burn too many bridges, I won’t have a way off the island. I pretty much disavowed the balrogs over at AT&T (minus the cell service, which is unimpeachable in Houston in my humble and regretful opinion), coining the now infamous “Shut it off, send me the bill!” rant over Skype. So, it’s looking like the floating rate bandwidth joy of cable internet when we get back.
I don’t think Comcast will allow the open inbound ports that AT&T was too stupid to block, so it seems that Internet Free Pearland will have to move somewhere else.
This makes me consider my old (I’ve been watching these guys for over three years now) prospect of Linode, which is such a cool little company it might be a lot easier to put up with downtime. Linode would also provide no-restrictions MUD hosting without Dynamic DNS, port forwarding, or other trickery. Plus just about anything else I felt like that didn’t consume an inordinate amount of RAM.
It’s twice as expensive as a normal shared host, but we’re talking serious features and flexibility here. Especially as the MUD nears testing quality: I could pick this up, leisurely migrate over from Joyent or whatever-the-heck, and have a midnight script that automatically kills the MUD, checks out nightlies from Google Code, and starts the server back up.
Plus, I can finally run a mailserver with a fixed IP, if I so desire.
And, the reason I write this all in the first place is that (1) Shell’s MI platform took a tremendously epic dump last night and has set back business reporting for a full day, and (2) I can’t SSH to Joyent or whatever-the-heck to get Cluster fixed.
I think the media finally has found a “phenomenon” that they can ride into popularity rather than trailing behind. The media started pushing blogs in earnest pretty much after the industry had already grown and consolidated under LiveJournal, Blogger, and the others. YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook were all approached with the characteristic forehead-slapping “how did that quadrillion person trend get there?” look that forced Fox News to air one YouTube video per hour in an attempt to weave grassroots media into the steaming machinery of mass distribution.
As far as Twitter goes for me, I don’t even care where I am most times when I have the capacity to update a web app regarding my status. And, as I’m sure readers here can attest, I can’t yell “Fire” in less than 160 characters, let alone communicate my deepest personal feelings and conditions.
Is Twitter the “poor man’s e-mail” Google says it is? Not at all. In fact, that careless comment betrays the same sort of arrogant misidentification of value that Slashdot showed the iPod.
But it is in a way the “lonely man’s e-mail,” an expressive tool for those who can’t aim the gun barrel of their intellect at a specific target, and — more importantly — at a specific context. Twitter is interesting to people by my reckoning because of its essential lack of context: is it for updates regarding the fiber content of my diet? Is it a mouthpiece for me to provide musings on philosophy? Should I announce my investment decisions?
Twitter is communication that actively eschews the Subject, the Title, the Section, and to some extent the To Field. The “@” notation has only recently been adopted, and from what I have seen it was a reluctant change; replying to someone is about as high-context as it gets.
We’re killing grammar on the web. In fact, let’s just go ahead and say web grammar is an oxymoron. The two-thumbed primordial SMS has its excuses, but the near convention of unconventionality betrays more death to context. We increasingly talk to walls, meaning not so much that we don’t expect a reply but that we care less and less how our message is received. Speed becomes the factor: why wordsmith this when I can get two messages out in the same time?
Well, quantity is taking over quality, and our communication is increasingly designed to be easy to ignore.
Who cares if I ignore a “tweet?” Who’s even checking, and who is expecting a reply? To quote my favorite poem, you simply spit nails into an abyss and listen.
By the way, the above “paragraph” is 158 characters long.
It’s funny when you get an e-mail at midnight from someone across the world re-requesting something they never requested from you originally. Then, as a note of courtesy, they forward their midnight e-mail back to you at 6:00 AM because you have not yet responded.
That could have been a rich opportunity for some no-consequences snark, had they not copied half the known world on both e-mails.
Is it somewhat more unsettling during this time of crisis when you go to a bank’s website and see “currently unavailable?” Of course, I forget that in the “real world” of time I’m checking this at 12:42 AM Houston time, but still…
